So I have had lockups in the past but it was because of something I did or hardware issues. A few hours ago I plugged in a 2.5 hard drive witha SATA to USB adapter. I use this drive to store music, after I transferred the files I safely ejected the drive and went out side for about 15 minutes. When I came back my computer was completely frozen and I had to reset. This is not that big of deal, but I was just wondering if there are any logs I should be looking at to see what caused this. Again this is not a problem, just my own curiosity.

The usual: messages debug syslog in /var/log/

Yeah I've combed through, didn't see anything. but I didn't look that hard. I just find this situation an amazing testament to Linux and Slackware stability

I'd see stuff like that when my power supply was starting to fail.

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@Daedra
Sh... happens and when it's a HW failure (or power issue as Richard Cranium suggested) you might not get anything logged
You could still focus on the log files and look after the first entries during the reboot, just after the hardlook, that's if you can remember the approximate time when you did it. If you find those entries, check if you got something before the reboot.
You should start to worry if these hardlocks are getting repetitive.

I had some unexplained hardlocks recently with one machine. There was never anything written to the logs, but it seems to be the kernel's fault, because it only happens with some kernel versions. Thankfully, I haven't experienced them at all again since the 4.14 series. Others with the same hardware haven't experienced it either as far as I know, so it's a real mystery.

A static charge buildup in your body can discharge through a USB port when plugging/unplugging USB devices. I have this happen occasionally when I'm not not careful. Usually the computer locks up.

Zapping a computer with a static discharge, like having a full disk drive, can result in a variety of unpredictable failures.

One can argue that the computer hardware must be defective for not properly handling the static discharge, but nonetheless the discharge may "break" the running computer.

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The Linux (in general) is not as stable as you think.

Yeah, it is much more stable than a particular and well known OS made in Redmond, but even more stable are the BSD flavors and the champion is Solaris.

Anyways, depends much on the particular hardware and the particular software versions. As in: depends very much.

I found the linux kernel to behave badly when it runs out of memory.

For a long time I had no swap device, and when the system got into memory pressure, it would become gradually unresponsive, processes slowing down to a halt, with load average going through the roof (30, 50, ...) UNTIL finally the OOM killer set in and killed a memory hog, after which the system returned to normal.

Then I falsely thought things would work better with a swap device. So i added an old 40 GB SSD drive I had lying around. I use it in toto as a block device, through the kernel encryption layer because otherwise sensitive data might be persisted on the swap device.

The result is that now, when the system gets into memory pressure, it freezes completely for multiple minutes. ZERO RESPONSE. after a few minutes it comes back and I find anything from 5 to 15 GB having been swapped out to the swap device.

It would have never crossed my mind that the linux kernel could perform even worse than windows in this respect, but it clearly manages to do so.

Check the memory. Unexplained crashes are often due to marginal memory.
Ed

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What's the source of this "data"?

Pentium III, 128MB, heavily used machine running public Internet services.

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It happens. I've had it happen a few times when running modded minecraft and run out of RAM. Also most recently it happened while playing No Man's Sky. I forgot I had chrome running, as well, and chrome will suck up as much RAM as it can. Two hogs of RAM on a computer that's long in the tooth is asking for trouble.

Also, in my experience random hard locks can be video card related. If it keeps happening, swap out the video card?

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Interesting, I had one yesterday when trying to launch a video through VLC. I just killed all the processes and logged back into the desktop [should have enabled a terminal shortcut for xkill which I've done now]. It happens occasionally, and from memory, mostly when trying to launch a video. I don't consider it a big issue.

If you can kill all the processes and log back in, that wouldn't be classified as a "hardlock" in the way the OP was using it.

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Hmm indeed. Thanks for the clarification. In that case I don't think I've experienced a complete hardlock in Slackware. The rarity of what the OP describes shows the strength of this OS.